Open-NFP Announces Dataplane Acceleration Developer Day Europe 2017

4.5.2017 07:00 | Business Wire

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Open-NFP, a worldwide, community-driven organization focused on research
and development in datapath offloads and acceleration for SDN and NFV
applications, announced today that it will host the upcoming Dataplane
Acceleration Developer Day (DXDD) Europe on June 7 in Utrecht, the
Netherlands. Open-NFP is experiencing significant demand for furthering
dataplane acceleration education and hand-on training for the commercial
and research community within Europe to foster next-generation,
high-performance SDN and NFV solutions and applications. The DXDD Europe
will bring together researchers, developers, students and industry
affiliates for hands-on training that satisfies a critical modern data
center need: the ability to change the network behavior of COTS server
networking hardware at the speed at which one can change software.

Since its inception and the first annual developer conference in 2015,
Open-NFP membership has grown and now hosts over 35 open research and
development projects from academia and industry. Relevant software and
sample datapath libraries are all hosted on GitHub, enabling
collaborative development across distributed teams. Many organizations
and universities have contributed from within Europe including Airbus,
Cambridge University, Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, Universita della
Svizzera italiana, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, SURFnet, and the
University of Wuerzburg.

Designers and operators of modern data center networks want the ability
to evolve the features they require in their networks to meet the needs
of new cloud workloads and changing traffic patterns. The DXDD will
feature extensive hands-on training that will enable participants to
rapidly develop or add new networking features into production and
ready-to-deploy COTS server networking hardware. The following
industry-leading topics spanning multiple programming methods will be
the focus of the training: SmartNIC dataplane programming using the P4
programming language; implementation of network functions such as time
stamping, probing, and micro VNF using C; as well as implementation of
seamless and hardware-agnostic dataplane acceleration using Open vSwitch
(OVS) and Enhanced Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technologies.

“Many of the Open-NFP research and development projects are coming from
within the European university and research community, and we are
excited to expand our highly educational dataplane acceleration
workshops into the region,” said Dr. Bapi Vinnakota, managing director
of Open-NFP. “Developers wishing to discuss today’s dataplane
acceleration challenges and further their own practical knowledge will
appreciate the opportunity for detailed technical discussions and
interaction with their peers. We look forward to continuing our
collaboration with the academic, industry and research communities to
further enhance their programming education and productivity.”

“P4 is a vendor neutral domain specific language that offers many
exciting new possibilities,” said Ronald van der Pol of SURFnet’s
network department. “We investigate P4 applications that give more
insight into what is happening inside the network, and also P4’s
potential to facilitate the introduction of new protocols. We look
forward to collaborating with Open-NFP to further dataplane acceleration
programming education within the European research community.”

“I head a young research group addressing topics related to data
analytics, network and systems security working in tight collaboration
with several industrial partners. Open-NFP is important for us because
we have access to technologies, which are otherwise closed and
accessible only through NDAs,” said Dr. Radu State, senior research
scientist and head of SEDAN research group at the SnT research center of
the University of Luxembourg. “Therefore, the Open-NFP constitutes a
valuable asset to my team to get a deep technical understanding of
cutting edge research and technologies in the field of computer
networking. Furthermore, the platform allows us to develop new
approaches for security monitoring, test and prototype them in realistic
conditions. I am glad that Open-NFP is making an effort to bring closer
and even more reachable all this content and expertise to us. I hope
there will be many more chances like this for researchers and
universities to come together and strengthen their knowledge.”

Register
today to ensure your seat at the conference. Members of the NREN
community receive a 50 percent registration discount. The conference
will be held at the SURFnet office at Hoog Overborch (Hoog Catharijne)
in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Open-NFP.org is a worldwide, community-driven organization that enables
open and collaborative research in the area of network function
processing in server networking hardware. The organization is designed
to serve the growing need from the academic and data center networking
communities to conduct cutting-edge research and development in the
areas of server-based networking datapath offload and acceleration
techniques. The organization’s website is designed to be a common
repository of open source networking datapath P4/C application code and
research papers. For more information please visit www.open-nfp.org.

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